For a fresh perspective on the Bush recovery from the dark economic days of the Clinton administration, we turn now to Reihan Salam of the National Review Online. It will have occurred to very few of you that the giant housing bubble/swindle was actually a jobs program.

REIHAN SALAM: I think that we certainly have had a deep employment crisis since 2008. But I think that to my mind the crisis started much earlier on. I think when you look at the Bush years for example, if you look at the recovery that we had during that period of time, the housing boom I think actually masked some of these deeper problems.

So for example during that era you saw really dramatic losses in manufacturing employment, yet you had employment in housing construction. And so there were a lot of folks who thought, you know, “Gosh, this is something that can sustain people, a lot of these kind of men who are really struggling to get on the economic ladder.”